Posts

Showing posts from April, 2015

How I Work - Hours

Image
In the last post I wrote, I talked about how I had difficulty organizing and staying focused as a tech. Today, I'm going to talk about an app that I found for my iPhone that helps me keep track of what I do during the day. Hours I discovered the Hours app for iPhone a few months ago when I wasgetting our Chromebooks ready for the new class of students coming in. I was really curious at how much time I was spending on getting these ready, so I launched the app and got to work. Basically, in Hours you can create several projects and start and stop them throughout your day. As you can see in my screenshot above, I have several different projects, including student support, teacher support, network maintenance, and so on. As you switch or start tasks, you simply tap on the timer next to each task. There's even a widget for the notification center on the iPhone to make it even more accessible. It's fascinating to look back at the day and see what I actually spent time on during

How I Work - Evernote and Wunderlist

I have a difficult time organizing, as a technician. Being the only tech for my school that is responsible for the network, our 1:1 Chromebooks and pretty much everything else that has an 'on' switch I have a lot going on. Organization can be difficult, but I'm finding a few things that help a lot. I'll highlight two of them here that I am currently using. Evernote Evernote is a pretty popular note-taking tool, so I don't think it needs much introduction. I use it as a running documentation tool, more for keeping track of network management-y type stuff. For example, if I use a Powershell command for creating a student account, I'll put that command into Evernote with a descriptive title so I can find it easily later, so I don't have to go Googling around to find something I had already figured out three months ago. I also use it during staff meetings to keep track of things that are going on, so when this time rolls around next year I can refer back to wha

Course Correction

Considering I wrote my 'I'm Back!' post back in October , and it's now April, I would assume it's safe to say I was a bit optimistic about tackling blogging again. Honestly, I'm a bit jaded by blogging--I mean, anyone can put anything they want on the Internet...and who reads it? It has to have some sort of value, some sort of worth to either the reader or the writer, or both. I've been encouraged to become more a part of the community of Edtech people, but I don't feel like I have a ton to offer as a non-teacher. I want to help, but how do I do it? This is the question that I've been trying to tackle for the past few months. I think, though, that in doing so I've arrived at a possible answer: self-reflection. That feels a bit cheesy, but I think that it may be the key to what I've been trying to figure out. Why not make it my journey, my story? I'm a tech, and I'm pretty good at it (I think), so why not share stories of what I do and